Fitzsimon File

The state policy debate in now fully in election mode as Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory and Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue are sniping back and forth about special interest money, immigration, and the recent legislative session.

Incumbents in the General Assembly and their challengers are weighing in too, parsing the actions and inaction of state lawmakers this summer on issues from transportation to mental health to economic development, the last one an area where predictably misleading and false claims are common.

Davidson County Republican Rayne Brown is running for the House and recently told his local paper that high business taxes in North Carolina are a major problem for the state's economy, echoing the rhetoric of the conservative policy groups in Raleigh.

One of the market fundamentalist think tanks recently criticized the General Assembly for expanding children's health care, building new classrooms on university campuses, and funding programs to reduce child obesity.

The group thinks lawmakers should have ignored those needs and used the money to reduce state business taxes instead, which they claim are stifling job growth and industrial recruitment.

Those claims continue to be taken seriously by some pundits and media types, despite clear and convincing evidence otherwise from numerous national reports and surveys. North Carolina has many serious problems, but an unfriendly business climate is not one of them.

The latest confirmation of that came this week came in a report from Development Counsellors International that found corporate executives around the country believe North Carolina has the second best business climate in the nation, behind only Texas.

The survey also found that business leaders most often get their information about a state's environment for business from their corporate peers in the state, not ideological anti-tax groups.

One conservative organization reacted to the report by pointing out that the corporate tax rate is one percent in Texas, well below North Carolina's 6.9 percent, the assumption that it is all about corporate taxes.

It doesn't take long to figure out the problems with that knee-jerk reaction. North Carolina ranks second, which means it is ahead of plenty of states with lower corporate tax rates, like Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, etc.

Business leaders are smart enough not to fixate on one tax rate when considering where to expand or relocate. They want reasonable taxes overall, but top corporate officials understand that a business does best when the community it is in is also thriving. Business leaders want quality public schools and universities, a well-trained workforce, access to a decent transportation system, a clean environment, and cultural opportunities, in other words a good quality of life for their families and employees.

It ultimately is not just about numbers or isolated tax rates, despite the claims and faux research of the market fundamentalists. That is not just the opinion of progressive advocates and tax fairness groups, it is what the nation's leading business executives think too and they are a far more credible source than anti-tax groups and misguided legislative candidates.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.